Reconsolidation: a long way from crabs to humans

MARIA EUGENIA PEDREIRA

Huerta Grande Cordoba

Congreso; XXVIII Congreso de la Sociedad Argentina de Investigacion en Neurociencias; 2013

After being stored, memories can be modified through further experience. Thus, inactive memories can be reactivated through the presentation of cues (reminders) that were presented during acquisition. This presentation results in memory reactivation (labilization), followed by a process of re-stabilization known as reconsolidation. From the beginning two questions have emerged recurrently. First, Is this process triggered every time a memory is retrieved? And second, what is the function of memory reconsolidation? This talk is going to be centered in the main results of our group, trying to answer these queries. Here, we showed in crabs and humans that the reconsolidation process is only triggered under certain circumstances, when memory retrieval involves an experience that engages new learning (a discrepancy between expected and current events). Finally, we described our contribution to the description of one of the proposed reconsolidation functions: the role and dynamic of strengthening in this process using the declarative memory paradigm. We demonstrated that the strengthening via reconsolidation not only increased the memory precision but also improved its persistence. Moreover, memories strengthened by repeated labilization reconsolidations are more resistant to be interfering by a second task.